Delta Program: Towards Supporting the Personal & Proffesional Development of Students in Extra Curricular Student Teams

This paper reports on Delta; an educational innovation aiming at supporting the personal and professional development of students in extracurricular, engineeringoriented student teams, helping them make their learning more explicit. Students in these teams already learn in a self-directed, flexible, and contextualized way, deciding what, how, and when to learn through their day-to-day tasks in their teams. However, individual learning is generally tacit and unsupported, resulting in a disconnect between the experience of students in the teams and their intentional development. Delta focuses on the integration of informal learning with structured development, linking team experiences to personal growth through reflection, peer learning, trainings, and workshops. Delta fosters self-awareness, autonomy, and the identity as engineers by aligning competencies with student's goals and interests. Delta has been running at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) since September 2024 as a first exploratory iteration in the educational design-based project initiated in 2022, with satisfactory results. This paper reports the educational design process, key considerations, and preliminary findings from evaluations with students, educators, and the design team. Additionally, we discuss the challenges for wider implementation.